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<h1 align="center"><span class="pagetitle">Which Tags to Use?</span><br>
<font size=2>= <span class="sitetitle">Index DOT Html</span> by 
<a href="email.htm">Brian Wilson</a> =</font></h1>

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<big><b class="mainheading">Reach the Largest Audience Possible</b></big>
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When building this site I tried to keep opinions on authoring out of
it. There are often many &quot;tricks&quot; possible to make something look
<em>EXACTLY</em> like you want. The problem is that the desired visual result
may only appear using one type of browser. Some HTML tags and
structures yield more consistent display results than others. The
guiding tenet to the author should <em>ALWAYS</em> be -
<b class="magicword">ACCESSIBILITY</b>. Whether it be making pages
readable by all or most browsers or making a page usable for
text-to-speech browsers, this factor should always guide your design.
<br><br>

Having said that, it is really up to you, the author, to decide which
tags to use in which contexts in order to accomplish this goal in
your documents. In the end, if a reader can not read some or any of
the content of your site, your message is simply not getting across to
all the people that it could. The tables of historical browser support for HTML
elements are meant as a guide only. It is up to the author to decide
which tags and techniques are the best in a given situation. Hopefully the
information presented here can help make the decision a more informed one.

<br><br>
<big><b class="mainheading">Things To Keep In Mind</b></big>
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In the past, authoring HTML Tables without a simple-markup alternative was
almost unthinkable since not all browsers could support the capability.
In just a short time, browsers have developed to the point that almost all
have table capability to some degree, even the celebrated &quot;Lowest Common
Denominator&quot; text-based browser, Lynx. It is always a good idea to test
how your pages will look on browsers that have more basic capabilities than
those in general use, but with some features such as HTML tables, it is becoming
increasingly harder to do this as the general capabilities of common browsers
increase.
<br><br>

There are many criteria to consider when trying to allow for different browser
capabilities. If these are considered or addressed in page design, it will
go a LONG way toward reaching the widest audience possible:
<ul>
     <li><span class="alert">What HTML capabilities will your target audience
         have?</span>
     <li><span class="alert">What HTML capabilities are generally available to
         the most commonly used browsers?</span>
     <li><span class="alert">What media capabilities will your audience have?</span>
</ul>
<br>

<big><b class="mainheading">Usable On All Browsers?</b></big>
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Elements like HTML tables are fairly safe now to use without needing an analog for
those who can not read them properly. Legal HTML &quot;tricks&quot; also exist (which I
try document in these pages) to help many newer HTML constructs degrade nicely
on older browsers. An author should try to incorporate these methods whenever
possible. There are some capabilities of HTML for which this graceful
degradation can never really occur. Text-only browsers or browsers designed
for the sensory - impaired for instance can not deliver the multimedia content
that many pages use to make the Web experience more visually compelling. In
such cases, there ARE some crude, and also some elegant methods to allow for
browsers that do not have rich capabilities, but they are often under-used.
Seek these methods out, use them as much as possible, and your readers will
thank you for it. After all, the content of the web is for the READER, not
for the author!
<br><br>

For a good treatment of this topic, there is a book that covers it fairly well
(although its information is very out-of-date now.) It is called &quot;Hybrid
HTML Design: A Multi-Browser HTML Reference&quot; (ISBN: 1562056174) by Kevin
Ready and Janine Warner. I do not have any affiliation with the publishers or
authors, but I did think it was an excellent coverage of the topic in its time.
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